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Hello, this is Dr3ad from Epoch Builds. In today’s forum topic we will go over Necrotic Yulia’s Path Crit Locust Swarmblade Summoner, where we barely make it to what I would call viable.
Soooooooooooo…Locusts. I am going to say this first before anything, as a big fat warning. This build is not good. It is barely capable of doing what I would regard as endgame content, i.e. 300 corruption. Could I make it much easier on myself and go to 200 corruption? Yes. But thats not the point. The point is to showcase the upper echelon of a build so that you, the viewer can make a good judgement on what you think of it.
Locusts are some of the worst minions in the game currently, but probably not for the reasons your thinking. They have a one of the biggest drawbacks of any minion in Last Epoch…a duration. At base they have an 8 second duration…which is bad. Most of the time in monoliths or on bosses, your not fighting the enemy, your fighting your own duration of your minions constantly. If your not constantly summoning your horde of parasitical performers, they will fade away. Much like a man in his 40s, if you don’t use it…you lose it and this is no exception.
These bug boys have been under constant experimentation by myself and a few other members of the community, and this is what I’ve eventually came up with. This is the most successful I’ve made a Locust build, and I doubt there is any better.
We are disabling our basic attack so that we may cast locusts. This was originally on release a much slower cast time, but EHG was ever so gracious to lower the cast time slightly, so that we don’t need as much cast speed to make the build feel good. So essentially the more cast speed we have, the more locusts we will get. This leads to our greatest conundrum. All of the good cast speed bases have no interaction with minions. If we want the best stat, minion melee damage % on our weapon, it means we need to utilize a non cast speed base. This leads to problems as cast speed is our best stat, but melee weapons are our perfered weapon of choice for the juicy melee minion damage affix. Sadly the latter wins, so we are using a minion necrotic pen axe with minion melee damage.
This means we need cast speed everywhere else where we can get it, including gloves, relic and the passive tree. My gear isn’t the best, and if I had some better I could have an extra 20% cast speed through + levels to swarmblade, but I do not have that good of gear yet.
We are also utilizing Yulia’s path, as it gives us an enormous amount of melee necrotic damage for our minions, which can get scaled my our necrotic pen axe and all of our increased damage. Since all of our increases are generic, we just want to slam as much flat damage as posisble, and Yulias does just that. Its also a nice amount of healing effectiveness which is our main sustain because we barely have any room for any other source.
Like I said earlier, this is not a good build. This is just simply a showcase of what I’ve done and learned from playing Locusts. Hopefully EHG listens to my feedback and at least doubles the duration on Locusts, as that would bring it back on the table, as 8 seconds feels way too short. One more thing to note, as I write this script, Locusts are bugged and are taking extra damage from AoE attacks, but that isnt enough to make the build bad, and when its fixed it wont magically make the build better because your locusts dont die to enemies, they just simply time out and disappear
Do you think they need buffed? What are your guys’s opinions?